- Correct by construction: the language makes invalid states or programs hard or impossible to express.
- Statically established: types, proofs, and static analysis establish properties before execution.
- Runtime-enforced: memory management, isolation, capability boundaries, and other runtime enforced properties.
- Empirically validated: program validation through tests, property-based testing, and fuzzing.
---
Along with being familiar, so it's easy to generate, is a huge part of why I'm building Zena: <a href="https://zena-lang.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://zena-lang.dev/
I don't have the AI-first rationale put into the public docs well just yet, but I mention some of it here: <a href="https://zena-lang.dev/guide/why-zena/#familiar-to-humans-and-to-agents" rel="nofollow">https://zena-lang.dev/guide/why-zena/#familiar-to-humans-and...
along with a doc in the repo on this topic: <a href="https://github.com/elematic/zena/blob/main/docs/design/ai-first-language.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/elematic/zena/blob/main/docs/design/ai-fi...
In short, the more deterministic, automated, checks the better. AI can deal with a pedantic language. I intend to add statically verified structured concurrency, units of measure, contracts, and eventually more and more formal methods into the language so it can be a familiar TYpeScript-like base with as many static guarantees as we can fit in.
I also think that fine-grained isolation, which Zena gets via Web Assembly, is critical for limiting the capabilities of generated code and the blast radius of bugs, vulnerabilities, and non-aligned behavior.
I do have an optimistic hope that a language also optimized for humans, readability and simple semantics especially, has value in the future, even when most code is generated. We'll see about that.
> bc agents will naturally be bad at it due to a lack of examples.
Can we please as a community stop parroting these false premises as a basis of every argument against doing anything new? It's plainly obvious to anybody that uses LLMs on a regular basis that it's not true.
True, it’s also trained on millions of papers of programming language research, so you can write a language to operationalize that research and it does great with it. The millions of lines of typescript scaffold the syntax, the PL papers scaffold the semantics.
spankalee · · focus · HN ↗
---
- Correct by construction: the language makes invalid states or programs hard or impossible to express.
- Statically established: types, proofs, and static analysis establish properties before execution.
- Runtime-enforced: memory management, isolation, capability boundaries, and other runtime enforced properties.
- Empirically validated: program validation through tests, property-based testing, and fuzzing.
---
Along with being familiar, so it's easy to generate, is a huge part of why I'm building Zena: <a href="https://zena-lang.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://zena-lang.dev/
I don't have the AI-first rationale put into the public docs well just yet, but I mention some of it here: <a href="https://zena-lang.dev/guide/why-zena/#familiar-to-humans-and-to-agents" rel="nofollow">https://zena-lang.dev/guide/why-zena/#familiar-to-humans-and...
along with a doc in the repo on this topic: <a href="https://github.com/elematic/zena/blob/main/docs/design/ai-first-language.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/elematic/zena/blob/main/docs/design/ai-fi...
In short, the more deterministic, automated, checks the better. AI can deal with a pedantic language. I intend to add statically verified structured concurrency, units of measure, contracts, and eventually more and more formal methods into the language so it can be a familiar TYpeScript-like base with as many static guarantees as we can fit in.
I also think that fine-grained isolation, which Zena gets via Web Assembly, is critical for limiting the capabilities of generated code and the blast radius of bugs, vulnerabilities, and non-aligned behavior.
I do have an optimistic hope that a language also optimized for humans, readability and simple semantics especially, has value in the future, even when most code is generated. We'll see about that.
demibabs · · focus · HN ↗
Agents will naturally be bad at it due to a lack of examples.
abletonlive · · focus · HN ↗
Can we please as a community stop parroting these false premises as a basis of every argument against doing anything new? It's plainly obvious to anybody that uses LLMs on a regular basis that it's not true.
demibabs · · focus · HN ↗
ModernMech · · focus · HN ↗